Object Appears to be a Meteor or Space Debris

Date of Sighting: April, 2001 (Exact Date Unknown. Year Could Have Been 2000)
Time of Sighting: About 7:30 AM PDT
Date Sighting Reported: July 12, 2008
Duration of Sighting: About 10 Minutes
Location of Sighting: Puyallup, Washington (Suburb About 10 MI SE of Tacoma)
Latitude: 47.13 Degrees North
Longitude: 122.28 Degrees West
Number of Witnesses: Three
Number of Witnesses Interviewed: One
Weather: Video Shows Mostly Clear Skies With a Few Low Clouds.

Description: I do not remember the exact date. I was in high school in the spring before I had my driver's license. I remember that the newspaper said that something was going to crash like a space telescope or space station. I saw what looked like a plane completely on fire in the extreme distance slowly falling from the upper left to lower right of the horizon at a 45 degree angle. I was looking exactly southeast. I was thing this was the space telescope or space station reentering the atmosphere. I went and got our Hi-8 camcorder and filmed it falling. It was falling for two to four minutes. Then it seemed to split into two pieces. One piece continued to fall down and to the right and the other fell down and to the left at a much more gradual angle. I had a spherical shape and was golden. I could see the shadow on it and knew it was completely spherical. I realized something was out of the ordinary. I hovered at an angle of about 10 degrees above the actual horizon and just above my neighbor's roof, but way far in the distance at least 20 to 30 miles. This had lasted about 10 minutes. About 6 minutes of this time the object appeared to be hovering.

Comments: The video shows a trail of something on fire. The object appears to be a meteor or possibly space junk. The appearance of hovering could be that the object was at a large distance and had broken into smaller pieces. These smaller pieces may have stayed airborne longer. The fact that the witness recalls reading about "something that was going to crash" would suggest that the object was probably a satellite or other space debris burning up in the atmosphere.